Inaugural teaching award given to music history professor

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Alice Clark, professor of music history and coordinator of music history and literature at Loyola University New Orleans, is the inaugural recipient of the American Musicological Society teaching award. The AMS Teaching Fund was established in 2009 to support and encourage innovative teaching practices in the music history and appreciation classroom. The award is part of a series of initiatives created as part of the AMS's OPUS fundraising campaign to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the society.

Clark will develop a web-based educational module focusing on Guillaume de Machaut, widely known as the most important poet and composer of 14th-century France.

“I hope to include in the module a wide variety of primary sources, including streaming audio with scores of selected examples of Machaut's music, selections of narrative and lyric poetry, documents and images from his complete-works manuscripts,” says Clark. “Explanatory essays, suggested discussion questions, and other materials will also be available to the instructor or student.”

Machaut has been at the heart of Clark’s research and studies since graduate school. Recent work includes a forthcoming essay on Machaut's motets for “A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Master,” an essay on the 14th-century motet for the “Cambridge History of Medieval Music,” an article on Machaut for the New Catholic Encyclopedia: Supplement 2011, and the Machaut bibliography for the Medieval Studies section of Oxford Bibliographies Online.

“By combining primary sources with explanatory materials, this site will be used to support classes in music history and medieval studies, as well as to increase the knowledge of Machaut and his work among the general public. I hope it also inspires the creation of more modules of this sort, facilitating a broader conversation about how we teach undergraduates.”

The formal announcement of Clark’s award will be made at the annual meeting of the society in San Francisco this November. For more information, contact Clark at avclark@loyno.edu.